Is that Bill Gates staring back at you from Outlook 2010?

Take a closer look at the fallback image in Outlook 2010's People Pane and you …

One of the new things in Outlook 2010 is the "People Pane." At the bottom of e-mail windows (both the inbox view and individual messages), the People Pane is a panel that can show recent e-mail from a contact, any appointments that you have with them, and a few other bits and pieces of information.

It's a neat little feature, especially when used in tandem with the Outlook Social Connector (part of Outlook 2010, and available as a download for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007). Making the Outlook Social Connector work is not quite as convenient as it should be; actual connections to social networking sites use providers that have to be installed separately—on its own, the OSC doesn't really do anything. But once you have the providers installed, the People Pane can show even more information—LinkedIn status updates, new photos posted to Facebook, that kind of thing.

The People Pane in action

One of the things the People Pane does is to show a little picture of your contacts. Outlook contacts can have pictures added to them, though I suspect most people don't bother. One place they do bother adding contacts to is their social networking profiles, and the People Pane will, with the OSC, retrieve profile pictures from Facebook and the other social networking sites it connects to.

But of course, not every person will have a picture available. So the People Pane has a fallback picture. A default, for when it can't find a better picture to display. The default is just a silhouette:

That isn't just anyone's silhouette, however. Our eagle-eyed editor-in-chief, Ken Fisher, noticed that the silhouette has a striking resemblance to one William H. Gates III. Quite how he noticed this is anybody's guess—we suspect he has a framed picture of the Microsoft founder and philanthropist mounted on his wall.

And it's not just any old picture of Bill Gates that some cheeky Outlook developer has used. Oh no. It's a picture from one of the man's finest moments. It's the picture taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, way back in 1977, when he was arrested for a driving offense, the exact nature of which is lost to the sands of time. It's the man's mug-shot.

Bill Gates was apparently a lousy driver. Just as well—he doesn't need to drive his own car these days

Bill is obviously in the center. The one on the left seems to be balding, so my guess would be Steve Balmer. I have no idea who the person with the (assumedly) long hair on the right would be. I guessed it might be Paul Allen based on how he was portrayed in the Pirates of Silicon Valley, but I googled around and it seems like he didn't actually have shaggy long hair like that back then. He did have an awesome beard, though.

Bill is obviously in the center. The one on the left seems to be balding, so my guess would be Steve Balmer. I have no idea who the person with the (assumedly) long hair on the right would be. I guessed it might be Paul Allen based on how he was portrayed in the Pirates of Silicon Valley, but I googled around and it seems like he didn't actually have shaggy long hair like that back then. He did have an awesome beard, though.

The guy on the right looks like the person in the back left of this classic photo:

Yes. It was all just to impress Donna. (Well, partly to shut his dad up.)

It just goes to show that one should never underestimate people who've been through the Justice System. Some of them might just be future billionaires. This particular one just happened to have made the operating system that most Computer Aided Dispatch systems sit on top of today in almost every police car in America that has a laptop. Police Officers, remember that on your next moving violation arrest.

I still have yet to see Jobs making incentives for Law Enforcement Agencies to put iPads/MacBooks in your local municipalities' Police Interceptors (Ford Crown Victoria). I'm not trying to fan fanboi rage here: I'll admit that the Aluminum body on MacBook Pro may take more of a beating than some of the lower-end Toshiba Toughbooks installed in a Mobile Unit these days... cost being about the same between the two models.